“Welcome to Contrastes Itinerantes, a wonderful exhibition which celebrates three years’ travel across three continents. Alejandra Lopez-Zaballa has visited Burma, Sri Lanka, Australia, Japan, America, Cuba and Mexico using her camera to capture a mixture of the natural environment and the man-made. These wonderful black and white photographs depict different ends of the same spectrum: the virgin world of a bamboo forest and the masculinity of the central train station in Kyoto.

There is a haunting quality that lingers with each of these photographs, whether through the total absence of humanity or the carefully wrought man-made structures of some of the world’s most notable architects, like the dome of the cylindrical Solomon Guggenheim museum in New York City, or the sails of the Sydney Opera House. In certain of these photos, nature and the built environment are fused. Ta Prohn, the twelfth century temple in Siem Reap has been overwhelmed by nature, strangled by the roots of a spung tree. A rickety, wooden jetty juts out across the waters of Mandalay, clouds loom ominously beyond the Brooklyn Bridge.

Each of these photos makes exquisite use of light, reflection and fog. The photographs of Bagan, the ancient Burmese city in Mandalay, and Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka show the landscape masked by mist creating an ethereal, dream-like quality. This collection brings together the works of an exceptional photographer who is curious and sensitive to everything around her. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do”.

Sarah Vallance is an Australian writer who works and lives in Hong Kong